Bringing Elegance to Complexity

This was our second trip to Mexico and Danielle’s first. We flew on AirTransat and arrived in Manzanilla which turned out to be a port city and was not really set up for Tourists. Rick used to come here as a child and that, along with the sales pitch for the hotel that hooked my mom, was why we decided on this place.

The hotel, The Karmina Palace Resort, was brand new and my first impression of the hotel included: half the people from our tour had to get rooms elsewhere because they’d over booked the tour, they tried to give us rooms off the parking lot, we were besieged by time share marketers who apparently worked for the hotel... All in all, not a auspicious start. The hotel was beautiful but a constant disappointment in service; from bad maid service to crappy food to an AirTransat representative (a very, very snotty French Canadian lady) who was constantly bumbling things.

That was the bad side... Danielle and I had a great time :) We ate out a local restaurants often and met many locals to party with.

One the day we were to leave we waiting at the airport in a closed in (no open windows) glass waiting room that had to be 45 degrees for a plane that was 3 hours late. My mother was so stressed by the heat that we had to get a medic to bring oxygen; when the medics arrived they didn’t know how to operate the oxygen bottle, luckily, I did and there was a doctor on the flight who helped after the medics left.

The plane arrived eventually but the passengers getting off told stories of burning smells and smoke in the cabin, so the flight was cancelled and we had to wait another night for a new plane to be flown down (they were no mechanics in Mexico who could fix the plane because it was new).

That night at dinner, someone made a copy of my credit card. When I got back Visa called me and asked me if I’d purchased a car, $900 of gas, $2000 of groceries, $2000 of stereo equipment and some other things... All the charges were reversed thought :)